The present invention relates to the packaging of individual items to be shipped as a group, and more specifically concerns the reduction of errors and omissions in selecting the individual items to be included in the group.
There are few things more frustrating than opening the shipping carton of your expensive new computer, unpacking all the manuals, cables, fasteners, and setup diskettes--and finding that one of the three power cords necessary even to turn the computer on is missing from the carton. Wait until Monday. Telephone calls. Music on hold. Ship the cable next-day air. Ask someone to watch for the delivery truck. Wrong cable. Repeat. Story of missing horse-shoe nail comes to mind.
This scenario has many variations. Buy swing set for children. "Some" assembly required. Unpack and check off bags of small parts. One bag of six frammis-head screws, unavailable at local hardware stores, is missing. There is little consolation in the fact that an extra bag of seat hooks has been substituted. Telephone calls. Et cetera. Or, as a more mundane example: A trip to the grocery has given you all the ingredients for a long-planned barbecue at the weekend cottage. As the festivities begin, you discover that only one of the two bottles of barbecue sauce needed had found its way into the bag. Return to the store in the city from Lake Faraway? No time. Will you shop at that grocery again?
The above problems all arose when a shipping worker--system assembler, dock clerk, grocery checker--picked up individual items in an order from a kitting list, ship order, grocery cart, scanned a code on each item, and gently placed them into a package for that order. The errors mostly happen when a difference arose between what was scanned and what was placed in the shipping container. Frequently, the worker sees multiple items of the same kind in an order, and scans the bar code for one item multiple times. He then may or may not throw the correct number of actual items into the carton. The worker may be interrupted after placing an item in the carton, and, having lost his place in the list, try to place a duplicate item in the carton. Really creative workers sometimes retrieve labels from scrap parts, tape them to a nearby wall, and scan these labels as they throw--or fail to throw--the actual item into the canon.
Eliminating this type of error will not solve all the problems of the shipping floor and checkout lane, but we believe that it will solve most of them in many diverse situations and industries.
In some cases, the use of a unique serial number on each item might alleviate the problem: scanning the same serial number more than once would kick up an alarm. However, serial numbers are impractical for small commodity-type parts. Too much tracking and paperwork is needed. Even if they were practical, the use of multiple sources for the same part would require a separate manufacturer number to guarantee uniqueness. Breakfast cereal serial numbers? Totally impractical.